Desalination plan. $120m bid to boost supply

Hamish Heard
A private company is planning a $120 million water desalination plant with the potential to sustain a billion-dollar industry surrounding Geelong, a former City mayor said yesterday.
Geelong Region Recycled Water Irrigators Association president and former mayor Ken Jarvis said Lara-based Plains Water Consortium was behind the proposal.
The company wanted to build a desalination plant to treat water recycled at Werribee Treatment Plant before piping it throughout areas north of Geelong and the Moorabool Valley.
Mr Jarvis said the water would be applied to more than 10,000 hectares of agricultural land, boosting the region’s rural produce output by as much as $1 billion a year.
The desalinated water would also decrease local farmers’ reliance on the Moorabool River, boosting environmental flows in the system which supplies drinking water to Geelong.
Mr Jarvis said the project would inject 15,000 megalitres a year into the region’s agriculture industry.
“Just a few kilometres away (at Werribee) we’re dumping tens of thousands of megalitres of a valuable resource a year into the sea,” he said.
“If we can turn a small proportion of that water around for good use we can transform a vast area of land, which is now essentially a desert, into a high-yielding, high-value agricultural enterprise.”
Mr Jarvis said many farmers in the Moorabool Valley were on the brink of collapse as the region sweltered after its driest winter in 150 years.
“This is not a daydream. We’ve got a company prepared to make the investment to build the pipeline and build the desalination plant. All we now need is leadership from State Government to allow it to happen,” he said.
Plains Water Consortium general manager Mike Jones told the Independent about his company’s plans for a similar project but on a smaller scale at Torquay.
However, he would not comment on the Moorabool project.
He said the $14 million treatment and dual reticulation project proposed for Torquay would desalinate and purify reclaimed water from Black Rock Treatment Plant for local domestic, agricultural and industrial use.